A conditional use permit to add 12 sites. What am I walking into?

I closed on a 30 site park last fall, my first one outside of houses. There is a flat cleared area at the back, about 2.4 acres, that already has a gravel loop on it from a previous owner who apparently started and stopped. I want to put 12 full hookup sites there. My contractor priced pads, pedestals, water lines and sewer laterals at roughly 14k a site, so call it 170k plus engineering.

At my current rates 12 sites at 60 percent seasonal occupancy would be somewhere around 55k a year of new revenue before costs, which is why I want to do it.

I called the county planning desk and the woman told me the park is a legal nonconforming use and that any expansion needs a conditional use permit, a site plan stamped by an engineer, and a public hearing. Then she said the health department has to sign off on the septic separately.

I genuinely do not know what most of that means in practice. Is nonconforming bad? Does a public hearing mean my neighbors can just say no? I have 170k I was ready to spend and now I am not sure whether I am three months out or two years out, and I do not know who I should be hiring first.

Answer

1dmitri_v6CapitalPRO6

Legal nonconforming means the park predates the current zoning, so it is allowed to keep operating as it is, and the catch is that expansion usually is not automatically included in that protection. That is exactly why they are sending you to a conditional use permit. It is not a punishment, it is the mechanism the ordinance uses to let a nonconforming use grow under conditions.

Get the actual zoning ordinance text, the section on nonconforming uses and the section on the conditional use standards. It will list the findings the board has to make in order to approve. Those findings are your checklist. Everything your engineer draws should be aimed at satisfying them one by one.

Hire a local land use attorney before you hire anyone else, because how much protection a nonconforming use gets and what triggers its loss varies significantly by state and sometimes by county. One thing to ask them specifically: whether starting the expansion without approval could jeopardize the nonconforming status of the existing 30 sites. That downside is much larger than the 170k.

5 replies

1luis_carrera Get yours

The public hearing does not mean neighbors get a veto. It means they get to speak and the board has to consider it. In practice a loud room can push a board toward conditions, buffer plantings, a lighting spec, a limit on hours at the bathhouse, and those conditions have costs you should assume now.

1Rena Expert

Sequence the septic ahead of the land use work, because it can kill the project outright and it is cheaper to learn that first.

Most states regulate onsite wastewater by design flow, and RV sites are assigned a gallons per day figure per site in the state code. Twelve full hookup sites at whatever your state assigns, commonly in the range of 50 to 100 gallons per day per site, is a defined load added to your existing system. If your current field was sized for 30 sites you will likely need either a field expansion or a new field, which requires soil evaluation and percolation testing on that 2.4 acres. Those tests are seasonal in many states because they want the water table at its high point. Missing that window is how a project loses a year. The specific design flow figures and testing requirements vary by state, so get them from your state or county health department in writing.

On your numbers, 170k for 12 sites at 14k each does not include the wastewater capacity, engineering, permit fees, or whatever conditions come out of the hearing. Wastewater alone can run from modest to more than the rest of the project combined if you need an engineered system.

Your 55k of revenue against a real cost that might land at 250k is still a reasonable return if it comes in, so the question is how much you spend to find out. Soil testing and a pre application meeting with planning and health together will cost a few thousand and answer most of it. Do that before you spend anything on stamped drawings.

1bmoreno23AB1B

Following this closely because I did not know a park could be nonconforming and still be fine. That reframes a couple of listings I had written off.

3jordan_ellis2ActivePRO6

The other thing worth pinning down is whether that old gravel loop was ever permitted. I looked at a property last year where a previous owner had graded a loop and run a water line without a permit, and the county's position was that the work had to be removed or brought up to current standard before anything new was approved. Quarry, ask planning to pull the file on your parcel and see what permits exist historically. If the loop is documented as part of an approved plan that was never finished, you may be in a much better position than starting fresh, and that is worth knowing before your attorney starts billing hours.